ARM's low end undercut by Andes core

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Andes Technology takes microcontrollers to a new low with the launch of a soft core that can deliver up to 108 Dhrystone MIPS/milliwatt and fit into 0.04 mm2 in a 90-nm process. The Hummingbird N7 core uses about 30 percent less power at the same performance of an ARM Cortex M0.

Two customers have already licensed the N7 for use in Bluetooth and touchscreen controllers. Separately, Andes (Hsinchu, Taiwan) is also shipping its high-end N13 cores, geared for dataplane networking systems running Linux.

The low-end N7 delivers 1.19 to 1.45 DMIPS/MHz using a mix of 16- and 32-bit instructions. It has a two-stage pipeline, can be implemented in 12,000 to 30,000 gates and employs a prefetch buffer that acts as a small instruction cache.

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Andes says it will further optimize its N7 compiler to extend its lead.

“Given what ARM is charging, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could cut your costs in half or more” using the Andes cores, said Linley Gwennap, principal of market watcher The Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.).

Although the smartphone applications processor gets most of the limelight these days, a smartphone uses many more cores outside that chip, Gwennap said. That’s a big opportunity in a wide range of comms and peripheral controllers.

My first thought was that if an ARM Cortex M0 can be purchased for under a dollar in quantity, there's not a lot of room for undercutting. But then I thought more about the "Internet of Things."
When connected embedded systems are being added to products that sell retail for, say $10.00, the difference between $0.80 and $0.40 starts to matter. When building an embedded system into something half that retail price, that same difference will likely be the determinant factor as to possible or impossible. I'm real interested in seeing where Andes prices their MCUs.

To Duane: you can get Cortex-M0/M0+ based MCU now for much less than 0.50$ from NXP (LPC800), Freescale (KL series), ST (STM32F0). Even Infineon announced on Embedded World 0.25EUR for their XMC1000. There is not so much gap to go lower ;-)!

Cost, cost, cost.... then code-density will be even more key than licensing cost.
I suspect a couple of kB of extra on-chip memory will quickly erase the 1-2% of royalties metionned above by Eewiz. Andes seems to be the only provider of tools for his processor, can the code size be really be as optimizied as the one of the big names like IAR, Green-Hills and all the others that compete for the Cortex family?
BTW, I find it weak to resume the story about "better DMIPS and lower cost". It's no secret it is easy to tweak DMIPS (which version?, inlining on?) and cost will be surely be all about negociation.
Now please Mr Journalists and Analysts, what about real investigation on what is really important for deep embedded systems?
* certified "difficult to tweak" CoreMark?
* what about interrupt latency or nesting?
* extra debug goodies like trace?
* what about family concept and compatibility with the other Andes processors?
Please don't treat embedded topics as you would cover apps processors. Catchy title is always good, content is even better ;-)!

Considering that there are free cores available, Andes has to offer a compelling value, presumably in system integration, peripherals, software tools and other ecosystem facilities. It'd be interesting to see how well they'll succeed in that---Far Eastern companies do not yet have a big track record in creating open communities and ecosystems.